Dr Marina Ezcurra and Dr Alex Benedetto were both selected to speak at the recent International C. elegans Meeting in Los Angeles (June 24th-28th). The two talks described new breakthroughs in understanding the mechanisms by which age-related pathologies originate in C. elegans, and generated considerable interest. Alex also described a new stress-resistance assay based on death fluorescence, recently discovered in the Gems lab. For details of the C. elegans International Meeting see http://www.genetics-gsa.org/celegans/2015/ More...

The 65th British Society for Research on Ageing Annual Meeting took place at the Institute of Healthy Ageing on July 1st-2nd 2015. Speakers at the conference included Claudio Franceschi (Bologna), Paul Shiels (Glasgow), Jesus Gil (Imperial), and Avan Aihie Sayer (Southampton). They also included several speakers from the IHA: Lazaros Foukas, who described how ageing can be slowed down in mice by reducing PI3 kinase signalling, Cathy Slack (whose talk was awarded the Korenchevsky Prize) spoke about how Ras signalling controls fruitfly ageing, and David Gems who gave a welcome address, including a discussion of “The ageing-disease false dichotomy”.For further information about the meeting see http://www.bsra.org.uk/node/842 More...

Changing of the Guard in C. elegans lab

3 April 2012

24 January 2012

The IHA waves goodbye to Dan Ackerman, who has joined Celeste Simon'sgroup at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Pittburgh,USA as a postdoc to work on HIF signaling and cancer. Also leaving thelab is Sara Valentini. Both Sara and Dan obtained their Ph.D. at the IHA(David Gems's lab). Also, Kathrin Schmeisser, a visiting Ph.D. studentfrom the University of Jena (Michael Ristow's lab) returned home after a4 month research visit. This month Dr Alex Benedetto joined the lab towork on the biology of sex differences in ageing in C. elegans. Alexworked previously on the genetics of manganese transport and toxicity inC. elegans with Prof. Michael Aschner at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.